Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers RANK AND FILE Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers Edited by Alice and Staughton Lynd Beacon Press Boston Copyright© 1973 by Alice and Staughton Lynd How I Became Part of the Labor Movement by John W. Anderson Copyright © 1973 by John W. Anderson Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association Published simultaneously in Canada by Saunders of Toronto, Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lynd, Alice. Rank and file. I. Labor and laboring classes-United States- 1914- -Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Trade- unions-United States-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Lynd, Staughton, joint author. II. Title. HD8072.L883 331.88'092'2 [BJ 73-6247 ISBN 0-8070-0508-8 The editors gratefully acknowledge permission to quote passages from The Company and the Union, by William Serrin,© 1970, 1971, 1972 by William Serrin, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Table of Contents Introduction CHRISTINE ELLIS, People Who Cannot Be Bought 9 JOHN w. ANDERSON. How I Became Part of the Labor Movement 35 STELLA NOWICKI, Back of the Yards 67 GEORGE PATTERSON, JESSE REESE AND JOHN SARGENT, Your Dog Don't Bark No More 89 SYLVIA wooDs. You Have to Fight for Freedom 111 MARIO MANZARDO. Liberi Cuori [Liberated Hearts] 131 BURR MCCLOSKEY, I Appeal the Ruling of the Chair 149 NICK MIGAS. How the International Took Over 163 STAN WEIR. The Informal Work Group 177 GEORGE SULLIVAN, Working for Survival 201 KEN TUCKER. It Got My Back Up 223 WAYNE KENNEDY. An Absolute Majority 233 JORDAN SIMS, Going for Broke 253 JOHN BARBERO, ED MANN AND OTHERS, A Common Bond 265 BILL WORTHINGTON. LEE SMITH AND ED RY AN, Miners For Democracy 285 List of Abbreviations 297 Acknowledgments We wish gratefully to acknowledge many kinds of help. Helen Michalowski spent many, many hours transcribing tapes in an effort to deepen her own understanding of history. Jim Wright and Fred Stern provided some of the first introductions. Betty Balanoff gener­ ously shared her own resources in oral history. Alfred Young, Ann Gordon, and the editors of Radical America and Ramparts took this work seriously and made it possible for us to publish fragments. Above all, we wish to thank the individuals in the accounts, their friends and families, who opened up their lives to us. Alice and Staughton Lynd Introduction HE INDUSTRIAL UNION organizing drive of the 1930s was a T movement for democracy. Talk to the mass production work­ ers who took part in it, and they will tell you that what they wanted more than anything else was dignity. They wanted freedom from the petty harassment of a foreman who could send a man home at will and reward those who curried his favor with steady work, pre­ ferred jobs, and promotion. They wanted "unions of their own choosing" which could stand up to the power of corporate employers and bargain on equal terms. Like democratic movements in America before and since, they believed that the human right to a job should take precedence over the property right to manage an enterprise as the employer sees fit. After World War II the labor movement fell silent, and the demo­ cratic impulse made itself felt in movements of blacks, students and women. These movements insisted that American society claims to be democratic but the reality is often the reverse. They asked, how can a society which calls itself democratic prevent blacks from vot­ ing? How can it treat students as IBM cards, and women as sex objects? How can it make war without consulting Congress, let alone the people? All these movements agreed that people should participate in the decisions which affect their lives. Now American working people are stirring again. They are beginning to question foremen and corporation executives whom they did not elect, and union officials who have lost touch with their membership. The groups which took part in the cultural revolution of the 1960s are moving into the workplace. Blacks have become a majority in many automobile plants and steel mills, students have graduated and taken jobs in white-collar bureaucracies, veterans are returning from Vietnam, women have gone out to work in larger 2 Introduction numbers than at any time since World War II. A new restlessness is evident in wildcat (unauthorized) strikes, in rank-and-file rejection of contracts, in demands for humanizing work and for a pollution­ and hazard-free work situation. Two events in 1972 symbolized the ferment. At the General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, workers struck against speed-up and arbitrary discipline. Their average age was under twenty-five. Many were veterans. Long hair and New Left life styles were common. In the Appalachian coal fields, the Miners For Democracy ousted the incumbent leadership of the United Mine Workers. Their movement grew in part from a campaign against unnecessary mine disasters and the slow death of Black Lung from breathing excessive coal dust. It is by no means clear whether the lasting impact of the new working-class consciousness will be progressive or reactionary. Miners For Democracy is widely supported by working people but so is George Wallace. Even supposing (as we do) that the thrust of working-class revolt is essentially democratic, what will protect it from betrayal by those whom it elects to office? Among rank-and-file working people there is universal resentment about union reformers who, once in office, kick the ladder away and forget to look back. It is hard to know how to prevent this. Thus difficult problems present themselves as workers sense their power and make their feelings known. This book is by and for people struggling with these problems. II In the following pages, a number of men and women tell of their experience as organizers. About half were active mainly in the 1930s and about half since World War II. About one third are currently involved in rank-and-file movements. Most grew up and worked in the Midwest and many in the steel industry, since this is the principal industry in the Chicago area where we lived while making the book. They were not selected at random. What unites these remarkable individuals is that, in our judgment, they belong to a tradition of working-class democracy. "Go see so-and-so," we would be told, "if you want to meet someone who expressed the spirit of the rank Introduction 3 and file." Led in this way from one person to the next we put to­ gether Rank and File. What do working people mean when they say ''rank and file'' and what do we mean by using it for the title of this book? Rank and file, in a general way, refers to workers on the job, not paid union leadership. Rank-and-file activity usually means people on the job taking whatever action they think is necessary, doing something for themselves rather than waiting for someone else to do it for them. It means people acting on their own, based on their own common experience. In the words of Percy Llewellyn, who helped to unionize Ford in Detroit, It wasn't the international [union]* doing it. We were doing it. This was on our own. We knew what the problems were in the plant, and we didn't have to go to some political officer to tell him we needed some help on this problem. We just went out and did it. And that was the big reason that Ford was organized. Ford was organized mainly because the workers in there did the job themselves. Rank-and-file activity may be directed against an intolerable employer or an unresponsive union bureaucracy. Neither the individuals in this book, nor we ourselves, are anti-union. "Don't get me wrong," says Clarence Stoecker, a retired farm equipment worker from the McCormick Works in Chicago (site of the strike which led to the Haymarket "Riot" of 1886). "I'll never say that you're better off without a union, that you'd do better to save that five bucks a month or whatever the dues is. You just can't do that." The fact remains that too many industrial unions have become bureaucratic closed corporations, like the craft unions of the old AFL. At best they are concerned with material benefits for their own members, not with the welfare of working people everywhere. At worst they have become a new kind of company union, financially independent of the rank and file because the company deducts union dues from the worker's paycheck (dues check-off) and politically all-powerful because the contract takes away from rank and filers the *National unions (as opposed to local unions) in the United States refer to them­ selves as "internationals" when they include Canadian members. 4 Introduction right to strike (no-strike clause). This is the situation that makes some union men and women say that they have two enemies, the company and their union leadership. How did this degeneration of the trade unions come about? The collective action of working people springs from the need for self­ protection. Those who are in a position to decide what others will do, when, where, and how they will do it and how much they'll get paid, have tremendous power over the lives of the people who work under them. It is extremely difficult for any single individual or any single local union to deal with that power.